[Glastonbury] Meeting on the 15th

[Sean Miller]

> Sorry to hear that - hope you're better now.  Been up to the Linux
> Expo today with Martin and Sean.  Small, crowded, noisy - a few big
> players but others noticeable by their absence.  RedHat and SUSE both
> there, as were HP, IBM, Sun.

It was a fantastic day out, and great to meet Andy in person for the first
time.

Sun's "Technical Evalngelist" gave a presentation late in the day on their
future strategy -- most of it was fairly bland uninteresting digs at other
companies (IBM were unfortunate enough to present before Sun, and there
were a lot of references such as "you might have heard the presenter
before me struggling to persuade you that..." and the ilk) but the new
Java Desktop product seems interesting... an "out of the box" productivity
suite (ie. e-mail, office, graphics etc. etc.) that is guaranteed to work
without tweaks or maintenance.

One of the "fun" parts of the day was trying to avoid the women collecting
money for ill children. Eventually I was just too worn down and paid my
£1.50 for a badge... this did not, unfortunately, stop them... I had to
keep waving my badge in their faces, crying (forlornly) "But you've
already nobbled me five times".... I don't know about others here, but I
feel that if I am to give money to charity it should be voluntary. I have
no objection to the organisation in question having a stand at the Linux
Expo, I have no objection to them calling out as you pass, but I do not
like them following you around the place nobbling you when you are in the
middle of a conversation with somebody else about something -- it is a
shame that charities feel they have to be so aggressive with their
fundraising.

Looks like I might eventually get Scribus working... the man who wrote it
(A German whose name escapes me) has given me his e-mail address and
promised to find the root of my problem for me... I am to send him all my
installation logs etc. and he will investigate.... that really blew me
away! Could not imagine most products having the same level of support --
so a definite "thumbs up" to Scribus methinks.

Just installed "Mambo", another of those "Content Management" tools.
Interesting one this, because it appears to be significantly more
intuitive than any I have come across yet... the fella who wrote it again
seemed very pleasant and approachable... will report back once I've played
with it more... early days (!)

Martin was rather blown away from a GPM route tracking system that was on
display. I did not, unfortunately, get to really have a good go but all
the way back in the car he was saying things like "It was amazing! You
really missed something" ... I was, you may note, quite happily navigating
my way home without it, silently wondering how precisely I would have
fitted Martin into the car had I had that huge server sitting in the
passenger seat ;-)

Tended to avoid the large stands, and the ones manned by people in
designer suits. Those reminded me a lot of the UKOUG Conference (Oracle
User Group) where all the stands are trying to sell you something -- big
bucks somethings, with even bigger bucks expected in consultancy to boot.
It was the small stands manned by enthusiasts that I found refreshing...
reminded me of the "ZX Microfair"s that I attended in Central London back
in the eighties... filled with developers showing off their *own*
creations...

The fact that most of these developers were promoting open source software
also pleased me, because whereas at something like the UKOUG the motive is
money, for these people there was no money involved. Mambo, Scribus,
openBSD, the character entry program for non-keyboard entry whose name
escapes me... long conversations resulted in "you can download it from
here" rather than "do you want a salesman to call" -- very refreshing
indeed :-)

>> i have 9.1 anyway. i also have knoppix 9.2 and the skolelinux iso.
> Knoppix 3.3 came out on 24 September 2003. This works for me where
> the late July one didn't.  Is your skolelinux the ??40 - didn't work
> for me - wouldn't get the customised apt.

I picked up the latest Linux Format at the Expo (wasn't free, but £4
rather than £6.50 seemed a good buy) which includes the full distro of
Gentoo Linux 1.4 -- yet to investigate how it is implemented in detail,
but it appears to be a DVD distribution rather than ISOs, so not having a
DVD-R I cannot burn copies, but I can certainly lend the DVD to anybody
who wants it.

>> kernel 2.6 is due out. test can be found here
>> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-2.6.0-test6.bz2
>> can we look at a session on "how to recompile the kernel"?

Sounds good!

>> >Is their going to be another meeting on the 15th?

I have lost touch with this conversation -- is there? If so, I can
probably be there.

Sean